The 20 Most Popular Programming Languages in 2026

According to the TIOBE Index for September 2026, the most popular programming language is Python, followed by C, C++, Java and C#. Among developers themselves, JavaScript is used the most: 66% of respondents to the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey worked with it. Below you will find the full list of 20 languages, the story of each with fun facts and a first program, a comparison of both sources and advice on which language to choose and learn.

The two sources measure different things. TIOBE counts how much is written and searched about a language on the internet, so it keeps older languages from science and industry near the top. Stack Overflow asks developers what they actually worked with last year, so web languages lead there. That is why it is useful to look at them together.

The most popular programming languages in 2026

The “A year ago” column shows the language's position in September 2025, and “Rating” its share in the TIOBE Index. Click a language name to jump to its description.

Python is still clearly first, even though its rating dropped by 8.22 percentage points in a year. The biggest climbers are Rust (from 18th to 10th), Objective-C (from 29th to 19th) and Swift (from 25th to 18th). Go and Delphi each fell four places. Ruby and Perl have left the top 20 and are now 22nd and 23rd.

Source: TIOBE Index (tiobe.com), September 2026 edition. Data retrieved on 30 September 2026.

Which programming languages exist?

There are hundreds of programming languages, and there have never been more than today. Below is every language on the list: where it came from, what it is used for, one interesting fact and what a first program looks like in it. By tradition, the first program in any language simply greets the world.

1. Python

Python is a general-purpose language written by the Dutch programmer Guido van Rossum; the first version came out in 1991. Its syntax is short and readable: code blocks are defined by indentation instead of curly braces, so programs look tidy even when you did not plan it. That is why many recommend it as a first language, as one reader also pointed out in the comments below back in 2020.

Today Python is the main language of artificial intelligence and data processing (NumPy, pandas, PyTorch). It is also used for web applications (Django, Flask, FastAPI), scientific computing and automating boring tasks on the computer. When you need to turn a pile of Excel sheets into one report or pull data from a website, Python is usually the shortest path.

Fun fact: it was not named after the snake but after the British comedy series “Monty Python's Flying Circus”, which its author enjoyed. If you type import this in Python, you get “The Zen of Python”, 19 short rules about writing code, such as “Simple is better than complex.”

First program:

print("Hello, world!")

To see a slightly bigger Python program, read the example how to extract details from a web page. Official site: python.org.

2. C

C was created by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs in the early 1970s to write the UNIX operating system. It was the successor to a language called B, so it got the next letter of the alphabet. It is a language close to the hardware: the programmer manages memory directly, and programs are small and fast. That is why C is often called a “portable assembler”.

The Linux and Windows kernels, device drivers and the programs inside the microcontrollers of washing machines, cars and routers are written in C. Even Python itself, in its main implementation CPython, is written in C. Whoever learns C understands what really happens inside a computer when a program runs.

Fun fact: the famous first program “hello, world” was made popular by the 1978 book “The C Programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie. Since then almost every programming book starts the same way, including the examples on this page.

First program:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("Hello, world!\n");
    return 0;
}

The language standard is maintained by ISO, and the latest version is C23. More about the standard: WG14 working group (open-std.org).

3. C++

C++ was created by the Danish programmer Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of C; the first commercial release came out in 1985. It adds classes, inheritance, templates and a rich standard library while keeping the speed of C. The language is powerful but also big, so few people know all of it.

It is used where speed matters most: games and game engines (Unreal Engine), web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, Photoshop, financial systems that trade in fractions of a second, image and audio processing. When a game on your computer runs smoothly with beautiful graphics, there is a good chance C++ is behind it.

Fun fact: the language was first called “C with Classes”. The name C++ is a programmer's joke: ++ is the operator that increases a value by one, so C++ means “C, one step further”.

First program:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Hello, world!\n";
}

The language evolves through ISO standards (C++20, C++23, with C++26 next). Official community site: isocpp.org.

4. Java

Java was developed at Sun Microsystems by a team led by James Gosling and released in 1995; today it is owned by Oracle. Programs are compiled to bytecode that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so the same program works on Windows, Linux and macOS. Hence the famous slogan “Write once, run anywhere”. Memory is managed by a garbage collector, which makes Java safer than C and C++.

Java is one of the main languages of large business systems in banking, insurance and government, usually together with the Spring framework. For a long time it was the main language for Android apps, where Kotlin has replaced it in new projects. If you have played Minecraft, you have played a game whose first version was written in Java.

Fun fact: the language was first called Oak, after a tree outside Gosling's office. As that name was already taken, they chose Java, after the coffee from the Indonesian island of the same name. That is why the logo is a steaming cup of coffee.

First program:

public class Hello {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

Official developer site: dev.java.

5. C#

C# (pronounced “C sharp”) was introduced by Microsoft in 2000 as the main language of the .NET platform. It was designed by Anders Hejlsberg, who earlier created Turbo Pascal and Delphi. Its syntax is similar to Java and C++, so anyone who knows one of them quickly finds their way. Since .NET Core, it runs on Linux and macOS as well as Windows.

C# is used for Windows programs, web applications and APIs (ASP.NET Core), mobile apps with .NET MAUI, the successor to Xamarin, and games in the Unity engine. A large share of mobile games is made in Unity, so C# is also the language of many game developers. To see how a Windows program is built, read the guide to desktop application development.

Fun fact: the name comes from music. The # sign (sharp) raises a note by a semitone, so C# is a “raised C”. Look closely and # also resembles four joined plus signs, like C++++. The project's working name was “Cool”.

First program (since C# 9 a whole program can fit on one line):

Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!");

Documentation: C# (microsoft.com).

6. JavaScript

JavaScript was created by Brendan Eich at Netscape in 1995. It is the only language that every web browser runs directly, so it powers almost every interactive web page: menus that open, forms that check what you typed, maps, shopping carts. Together with HTML (content) and CSS (appearance) it is one of the three core technologies of the web. With Node.js (nodejs.org) it also runs on the server, so you can build an entire website in one language.

Larger applications use libraries and frameworks such as React, Angular and Vue. The language is standardized as ECMAScript and gets a new version every year. It is only sixth in the TIOBE Index, but in the Stack Overflow survey it has been used by more developers than any other language for more than ten years in a row.

Fun fact: Brendan Eich built the first version of the language in just ten days, in May 1995. It was first called Mocha, then LiveScript, and it got the name JavaScript for marketing reasons, because Java was fashionable at the time. Otherwise it has about as much to do with Java as a car has with a carpet.

You can try the first program right now: press F12 in your browser, open the Console tab and type:

console.log("Hello, world!");

Documentation: JavaScript (mozilla.org).

7. Visual Basic

In the TIOBE Index, “Visual Basic” means Visual Basic .NET, Microsoft's language for the .NET platform. The old Visual Basic 6 is listed separately, in 25th place. Its syntax uses words instead of symbols (If ... Then ... End If), so it reads almost like English. Microsoft still supports it, but since 2020 it no longer adds new features to the language.

Today Visual Basic is mostly found in existing business programs that companies have maintained for years. The related language VBA lives inside Excel, Word and Access: if you have ever recorded a macro in Excel, Excel wrote VBA code for you.

Fun fact: Microsoft's first product, in 1975, was a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 computer, written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Visual Basic 1.0 in 1991 brought something new: the program window was drawn with the mouse, and code was written “behind” the buttons. Many of today's developers made their first programs exactly that way.

First program:

Module Program
    Sub Main()
        Console.WriteLine("Hello, world!")
    End Sub
End Module

Documentation: Visual Basic (microsoft.com).

8. SQL

SQL (Structured Query Language) is the language for working with relational databases. It was created by Donald Chamberlin and Raymond Boyce at IBM in the 1970s, based on the relational model published in 1970 by their colleague Edgar F. Codd. SQL is declarative: you describe which data you want, and the database system decides how to find it.

SQL is standardized (the latest version is SQL:2023), and each system adds its own extensions: MySQL (mysql.com), PostgreSQL (postgresql.org), Microsoft SQL Server (microsoft.com) and Oracle. Almost every business program, online shop and website has a database behind it, so SQL is useful to every developer, whatever else they work in. How a database is planned is explained in the guide to databases.

Fun fact: the language was first called SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language), but the name had to change because it was already a trademark. That is why it is still pronounced two ways, “ess-cue-ell” and “sequel”, and both are correct.

A sample query reads almost like a sentence: “select the name and city of customers from Belgrade, sorted by name”:

SELECT name, city
FROM customers
WHERE city = 'Belgrade'
ORDER BY name;

9. R

R is a language for statistics and data analysis created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in 1993. It has more than 20,000 ready-made packages for statistical methods and charts (the best known is ggplot2), so little has to be written from scratch.

It is used by scientists, statisticians, biologists, epidemiologists and analysts in banks and pharmaceutical companies. Many of the scientific charts you have seen in the news were made in R. This year it climbed four places in the TIOBE Index, to 9th.

Fun fact: the name R comes from the first letters of its authors' first names (Ross and Robert), and it is also a play on the S language on which R is based.

The average of a list of numbers in two lines (the arrow <- is how values are assigned in R):

x <- c(4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42)
mean(x)

Official site: r-project.org.

10. Rust

Rust started as a personal project of Graydon Hoare, was then developed by Mozilla, and version 1.0 was released in 2015. Today it is run by the Rust Foundation. It is as fast as C and C++, but its compiler prevents a whole class of memory errors that are a common cause of security vulnerabilities. Beginners often “argue” with the compiler in their first weeks, but once a program compiles, it usually works.

That is why large companies are adopting it: it is used in the Linux kernel, in parts of Windows and Android, in command-line tools and on servers. It has been the most admired language in the Stack Overflow survey for years: in 2025, 72% of those who worked with it wanted to continue. In the TIOBE Index it climbed eight places in a year, the most of any language in the top ten.

Fun fact: Rust programmers call themselves “Rustaceans”, a play on crustaceans, and the language's unofficial mascot is an orange crab named Ferris.

First program (the exclamation mark in println! means it is a macro, not an ordinary function):

fn main() {
    println!("Hello, world!");
}

Official site: rust-lang.org.

11. Fortran

Fortran was developed by John Backus's team at IBM in 1957 and is one of the oldest languages still in use. It was the first high-level language to come into wide use: before it, programs were written in machine code or assembly. It was designed for numerical computation and is still very fast at it.

Weather forecasts, climate models, physics simulations and supercomputer programs run on it. When the forecast says it will rain tomorrow, part of the calculation behind it was probably done in Fortran. The latest standard is Fortran 2023.

Fun fact: the name stands for FORmula TRANslation. The first programs were written on punched cards: each line of code was one card, and a thousand-line program was a box of cards that must never be dropped.

First program:

program hello
    print *, "Hello, world!"
end program hello

Community site: fortran-lang.org.

12. Go

Go was created at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson and announced publicly in 2009. The story goes that they came up with it while waiting for a large C++ program to compile. That is why the language is deliberately small and simple, compiles in a blink and produces a single executable with no extra dependencies. Built-in support for concurrency (goroutines and channels) makes it easier to write servers that handle many users at once.

The tools behind today's cloud are written in Go: Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform. It is most often used for server-side services, APIs and command-line tools. This year it fell four places in the TIOBE Index, but developers still like using it.

Fun fact: the language's mascot is a gopher drawn by the illustrator Renée French. One of its authors, Ken Thompson, created both UNIX and the B language, C's predecessor, in 1969. Because the word “go” is hard to search for, the language is often called “golang”.

First program:

package main

import "fmt"

func main() {
    fmt.Println("Hello, world!")
}

Official site: go.dev.

13. Delphi/Object Pascal

Delphi is a development environment released by Borland in 1995 and based on the Object Pascal language. Pascal was created in 1970 by the Swiss professor Niklaus Wirth as a language for teaching programming, and generations of students wrote their first programs in it. Today Delphi is developed by Embarcadero.

It is known for fast development of Windows programs: windows are designed with the mouse, and the application connects easily to a database. Many accounting, warehouse and other business programs are written in Delphi and are still maintained.

Fun fact: it was named after the Oracle of Delphi. Delphi was meant for connecting to databases, and the best-known database was Oracle, hence the saying: “If you want to talk to the Oracle, go to Delphi.”

First program:

program Hello;
begin
  WriteLn('Hello, world!');
end.

Official site: Delphi (embarcadero.com).

14. PHP

PHP was created by Rasmus Lerdorf in the mid-1990s as a set of tools for his personal website, not as a serious programming language. Others soon started using it, and today it is one of the most widespread languages on the web. It runs on the server and generates the HTML that reaches the browser, so visitors never see the PHP code.

WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and almost every hosting plan run on PHP, so it is still the language behind the largest number of websites whose server-side language can be detected. This website is written in PHP too. Modern PHP (version 8.x) is fast and supports types, and the best-known frameworks are Laravel and Symfony.

Fun fact: PHP originally stood for “Personal Home Page”. Today it stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”, an abbreviation that contains itself. The language's mascot is a blue elephant, the “elePHPant”.

First program:

<?php
echo "Hello, world!";

Official site: php.net.

15. Scratch

Scratch is a visual language for children and beginners released by the MIT Media Lab in 2007. Programs are not typed but assembled from colourful blocks, like a puzzle, so there are no syntax errors. A child sees the result immediately: a character on the screen walks, jumps and talks.

It is used in schools around the world for first steps in programming, and people make games, animations and interactive stories in it. You can publish your project on the Scratch website, where others can view and remix it. If you have a child who loves games, Scratch is a good way for them to start making games instead of only playing them.

Fun fact: the name comes from “scratching”, the technique DJs use to mix sounds from records. In Scratch, too, other people's projects are freely taken and remixed into something new. The mascot is an orange cat.

The first program is two blocks, one below the other: “when green flag clicked” and “say Hello, world!”. Site: scratch.mit.edu.

16. Assembly language

Assembly is not a single language but a way of writing a specific processor's machine instructions as words instead of numbers. Each processor family (x86, ARM, RISC-V) has its own. A program in assembly does exactly what you wrote, instruction by instruction, without a single extra step.

Whole programs are rarely written in it today, but it is used for the most critical parts of code, system startup, microcontrollers and analysing other programs (reverse engineering). Anyone who has written something in assembly looks at “ordinary” languages differently forever.

Fun fact: the computer game RollerCoaster Tycoon from 1999 was written almost entirely in assembly, the work of one man, Chris Sawyer. The program that guided Apollo 11 to the Moon in 1969 was written in assembly for the onboard computer, and the full code is now publicly available on GitHub.

Two instructions for x86 processors (text after the semicolon is a comment):

mov eax, 5    ; put 5 into the eax register
add eax, 3    ; add 3, eax now holds 8

17. Ada

Ada was created in the early 1980s for the US Department of Defense, which was using hundreds of different languages at the time and wanted one common language. The competition was won by a team led by the Frenchman Jean Ichbiah. The language is strict and designed so that errors are caught as early as possible, already at compile time.

That is why it is used where a mistake can cost lives: aircraft, railway signalling, spacecraft and military systems. Ada may well control some part of a plane you have flown on without you ever knowing it.

Fun fact: the language is named after Ada Lovelace, who in 1843 wrote a procedure for computing Bernoulli numbers on Babbage's Analytical Engine, a machine that was never built. That is why she is considered the world's first programmer. The language standard is designated MIL-STD-1815, because 1815 is the year she was born.

First program:

with Ada.Text_IO;

procedure Hello is
begin
   Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line ("Hello, world!");
end Hello;

Community site: ada-lang.io.

18. Swift

Swift was introduced by Apple in 2014 as the successor to Objective-C. It is the main language for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple Vision Pro apps, usually together with SwiftUI for building interfaces. It is open source and also runs on Linux, so it is used on servers as well. This year it climbed seven places in the TIOBE Index.

If you want to build apps for Apple devices, Swift is the natural choice, but you need a Mac for it, because the apps are built in Apple's Xcode environment.

Fun fact: Chris Lattner started developing Swift in 2010, in secret, and for four years only a small number of people at Apple knew about it. Apple also offers a free app, Swift Playgrounds, where children and adults learn programming through play.

First program (the same as in Python):

print("Hello, world!")

Official site: swift.org.

19. Objective-C

Objective-C was created in the early 1980s by Brad Cox and Tom Love, who added Smalltalk-style messaging between objects to C. Through NeXT computers, the company Steve Jobs founded after leaving Apple, it came to Apple and was the main language for macOS and iOS until Swift arrived.

New apps are now mostly written in Swift, but a large part of existing code and Apple's libraries is still in Objective-C. This year it made the biggest jump on the list, ten places, and returned to the top 20 of the TIOBE Index.

Fun fact: the world's first web browser, WorldWideWeb, was written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 in Objective-C on a NeXT computer. Without this language the web might look different.

First program:

#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

int main() {
    NSLog(@"Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

Documentation: Objective-C (apple.com).

20. COBOL

COBOL was created in 1959 as a language for business data processing, with Grace Hopper, one of the pioneers of computing, as a major influence. It was designed to read like English sentences, with the idea that managers, not only programmers, could understand it.

Banks, insurance companies and government agencies still run systems written in it on mainframe computers, because replacing huge, proven systems is expensive and risky. When you withdraw cash from an ATM, there is a good chance a COBOL program is somewhere in the chain.

Fun fact: when unemployment claims suddenly surged during the 2020 pandemic, several US states publicly asked for programmers who knew COBOL, because their systems were written in it and most experienced programmers had retired.

First program:

IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
PROGRAM-ID. HELLO.
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
    DISPLAY "Hello, world!".
    STOP RUN.

Important languages outside the TIOBE top 20

Some languages rank low in the TIOBE Index but are used by developers every day. The numbers in brackets are the TIOBE position and the share of 2025 Stack Overflow survey respondents who worked with the language.

TypeScript (TIOBE 39, Stack Overflow 43.6%)

TypeScript is Microsoft's extension of JavaScript (2012) with static types: errors show up while writing code, not only when a user clicks the wrong button. It compiles to plain JavaScript. Today it is the usual choice for larger web applications in React, Angular and Vue. Interestingly, it was designed by Anders Hejlsberg, the same person behind Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C#. Site: typescriptlang.org.

Bash and shell (Stack Overflow 48.7%)

The shell is the command language of UNIX and Linux, and Bash is the most widespread one. It is used to run commands, write scripts that automate and maintain servers, and connect other programs. The name Bash is a pun: “Bourne Again SHell” sounds like “born again”, because it was created as a replacement for the older Bourne shell. On Windows, PowerShell plays the same role (TIOBE 32, Stack Overflow 23.2%).

Kotlin (TIOBE 26, Stack Overflow 10.8%)

Kotlin was created by JetBrains, and since 2019 Google has recommended it as the first choice for Android apps. It runs on the Java Virtual Machine and can be mixed with Java code, but it is shorter and safer. It was named after Kotlin Island near Saint Petersburg, just as Java was named after an island. Site: kotlinlang.org.

Ruby (TIOBE 22, Stack Overflow 6.4%)

Ruby was released in 1995 by the Japanese programmer Yukihiro Matsumoto with the goal of making programming enjoyable. It is best known for the Ruby on Rails framework, on which GitHub, Shopify and Airbnb were built. It was named after the ruby gemstone, as a nod to the Perl language (pearl). This year it dropped out of the TIOBE top 20. Site: ruby-lang.org.

Dart (TIOBE 41, Stack Overflow 5.9%)

Dart is Google's language, used today mainly with Flutter, a framework for building apps that run on Android, iOS, the web and desktop from the same code. Anyone who wants one app for both phones instead of two often chooses Flutter and Dart. Site: dart.dev.

Perl (TIOBE 23), Scala (44) and Haskell (49) have also dropped out since last year's edition of this list. HTML and CSS rank high in the Stack Overflow survey (61.9%), but they are not programming languages: HTML describes a page's content and CSS its appearance.

Which programming language is most in demand?

The answer depends on whom you ask. TIOBE measures how much a language is written about and searched for, while Stack Overflow asks developers what they actually worked with. The table shows the 20 languages most used by developers according to the 2025 Stack Overflow survey (excluding HTML/CSS) and the position of the same languages in the TIOBE Index for September 2026. As of the date of writing (30 September 2026), the 2026 Stack Overflow survey has not been published yet, so the latest available one is used.

What the comparison shows:

• Python, Java, C#, C++ and C rank high on both lists. They are safe choices for learning and for work.
• JavaScript, TypeScript, SQL and Bash are used by developers far more than TIOBE suggests. They are used every day alongside other languages, but are written about less as a “main” language.
• Fortran, Delphi, Ada, COBOL and Visual Basic rank high in TIOBE because of the large amount of old but important code and literature, yet only a small share of Stack Overflow respondents use them.
• Python is on the strongest rise: according to Stack Overflow it grew by 7 percentage points in a year, and it is the language most developers want to use next year (39.3%).

Which programming language should you choose?

The best language is the one that fits what you want to build. The table gives a starting point for the most common areas.

Which programming language should you learn first?

If you are just starting out, it is best to begin with a general-purpose language, and for most people that is Python. It will not bother you with braces and semicolons, and everything you learn (variables, conditions, loops, functions, working with data) carries over to every language that follows. If the web attracts you most, start with HTML, CSS and JavaScript: you see the result in the browser straight away, which is a great motivator. For children, Scratch is an excellent start, followed by Python.

Do not let the choice scare you. A second language is learned much faster than the first, and most developers work in several languages during their careers. It matters far more that you learn by building something of your own: a calculator, a to-do list, a small website about your hobby. Nobody becomes a programmer by reading, just as nobody becomes a swimmer by watching a pool.

If you are learning for a job, also look at job ads in your city. They show best which languages are in demand where you want to work.

How is the popularity of programming languages measured?

• TIOBE Index is published monthly by the Dutch company TIOBE. It counts search results for “X programming” on several search engines and websites. It shows how present a language is on the internet, not how much code is written in it.
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025 (stackoverflow.co) is conducted once a year among visitors to that site. In 2025, 31,771 respondents answered the question about languages. It shows what developers actually work with, although web developers are overrepresented.
• GitHub Octoverse (github.com) is an annual report on the languages used in GitHub projects. It is useful for following open source.

No source is perfect, which is why this page compares two. The list is updated once a year, and previous editions remain in the archive.

Previous editions of this list

• The 20 Most Popular Programming Languages in 2025
• 20 Most Popular Programming Languages in 2024